Incandescent light bulbs are inefficient, last only a couple of years at most, and can emit light in one color only. It’s time to introduce the concept of interior lighting to the 21st century.
Today, people expect more from their interior lighting options. Those people use the ilumi LED Smartbulb, available at the discounted price of $79 at Cult of Mac Deals for a limited time.
Apple snuck 4K video support onto the iPad Air 2. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Apple packed the biggest display it’s ever made onto the iPhone 6 Plus, and while its 1920×1080 resolution is great for streaming 1080p videos, it turns out that Apple also secretly added 4K video support without telling anyone.
The iPad Air 2, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus all support 4K video playback out of the box, thanks to the new A8 processor added this year. Apple doesn’t list 4K video playback as one of the A8 chips features, but the discovery was made by the developers behind WALTR, who posted proof of 4K video playback on the iPhone 6 this weekend.
Chris Pratt seems concerned. Photo: Universal Studios
The fourth movie in the Jurassic Park series is slated to terrorize movie screens a full year from now. In order to drum up some excitement for Jurassic World, then, Universal has created this tiny trailer to advertise yet another trailer for the upcoming blockbuster.
The new trailer for a trailer shows very little, with some dinosaurs, a bubble car, an inquisitive Bryce Dallas Howard, and megastar Chris Pratt looking determined. Check it out.
Apple wants you to buy an iPhone this Black Friday Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Americans are four days away showing how grateful they are for the biggest shopping day of the year, and to draw in more upgrades than ever, Apple is giving away $50 iTunes gift cards with the purchase of every iPhone and iPad.
Continuing its huge (RED) promotion announced yesterday, Apple will dole out (RED) iTunes gift cards in varying amounts to shoppers who pick something up on Black Friday. The deals aren’t much more impressive than last year’s meager offerings, but for the first time ever, Apple is including the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the deal.
You can also get an iTunes gift card for buying a Mac, iPod, Apple TV, or Beats product. Here’s how much iTunes cash you’ll get for each:
That fancy Rolex face you’ve downloaded for your smartwatch won’t be available for much longer if luxury watchmakers get their way. A number of the world’s leading watch brands are clamping down on copycat faces designed for smartwatches and hope to get them banished from the Internet, according to a new report.
Live fast, die young, pay for your purchases using Apple Pay. Photo: Chase.
NFC payments might be easy, but up until now it’s fairly safe to say that they’ve never been cool in the conventional sense. Hoping to change that perspective is a new TV spot by Chase bank, which shows Apple Pay being used by super-cool indie band Bleachers.
The ad shows the indie band travelling around Los Angeles, buying items with their iPhones. In a sense, it’s a bit similar to Eddy Cue’s recent Apple Pay demo, except instead of being a middle-aged man buying Frozen toys, it’s a rockin’ pop band buying custom guitars, cool haircuts and nachos.
Hit the outdoors with these gift ideas. Photo: Christian Arballo/Flickr CC
Going gear-shopping for your favorite outdoors-loving friend or family member can be harder than trekking up Mount St. Helens as she’s about to blow. There are so many options, but so much crap.
To help you out with your holiday shopping, Cult of Mac waded through the endless lists of camping and hiking gear and gadgets to find the stuff your special someone will love.
Whether you’re looking for something for an adventuring buddy, or picking a present for someone you’d never want to be trapped in a tent with, we’ve found gifts for everyone. From hiking clothes to campsite gadgets, we’ve got you covered.
Apple execs are in for a happy holiday if leading analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is to be believed. Photo: Apple Photo: Apple
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is one of the most reliable analysts out there as relates to upcoming Apple products. Having called various things correctly in the run-up to the iPhone 6’s release (such as Apple’s sapphire manufacturing issues), he’s now forecasting numbers for the handsets over the holiday season — And they’re big!
In a new report to investors, Kuo predicts that Apple will sell a giant 71.5 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units over the 3-month holiday period. By comparison, one year ago the company sold 51 million iPhones during that same period.
Kuo’s research note also touches on several other topics, including the future of the iPhone 4s and 5c, as well as early speculation about the iPhone 7.
In previous years, Apple Stores around the world have turned their logos red to mark World AIDS Day. Photo: Onguito/Iconosquare
Apple has announced plans for its “biggest fundraising push yet” for this year’s World AIDS Day on December 1 — with a dedicated new section of the App Store, and plans to donate a portion of all sales on two of the year’s busiest shopping days.
“Apple is a proud supporter of (RED) because we believe the gift of life is the most important gift anyone can give,” Tim Cook said in a statement. “For eight years, our customers have been helping fight AIDS in Africa by funding life-saving treatments which are having a profoundly positive impact.”
“This year we are launching our biggest fundraising push yet with the participation of Apple’s retail and online stores, and some of the brightest minds in the App Store are lending their talents to the effort as well.”
Why won't Apple let third-party keyboards offer dictation? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
If you’ve installed a third-party keyboard on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 8, you might have noticed a strange omission: While you can communicate in animated GIFs or Klingon, you can’t dictate into any keyboard not made by Apple.
Reddit user 11011 sums up the puzzling situation nicely: “I can’t get myself to stick to alternate keyboards because I use dictation way too much and switching keyboards is a hassle.”
For a flagship device, Samsung’s Galaxy S5 doesn’t exactly sound like it’s flying high. According to a new report from theWall Street Journal, Samsung dramatically overestimated how many people were hankering after its new handset, with the result being that unsold units are now “piling up in warehouses.”
Although the S5 has sold around 12 million units in its first three months, that is substantially less than the numbers of the previous generation Galaxy S4, which sold around 4 million more in that same time frame. This would be bad news at any time, but Samsung was reportedly so gung-ho about the S5’s sales prospects that it actually increased production by 20%.
This week: the next iPhone might feature a massively improved camera; Uber’s super bro culture gets bad press, but we want to party with their brogrammers; why we’re not so jazzed on Apple Watch apps; Steve Jobs drowns the first iPod prototype to prove a point; and finally, what we like and don’t about the gadgets and Apple accessories we’re reviewing—it’s an all-new Under Review.
Chuckle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.
Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.
There are dozens of killer bargains on some of the best tech the internet has to offer at Cult of Mac Deals.
The deals are so good, they can only be offered for a limited time. Today we put the spotlight on four deals that are close to finishing. Snap these up before they’re gone forever.
Paper Camera is just plain fun. Plenty of photo apps let you apply filters after the fact, but this one performs its manipulative magic inside your camera, transforming your images in real-time before your dazzled eyes.
The filters are robust, offering a nice variety of cartoon- and painting-style choices to help make even the most uninteresting photographic situations colorful, graphic or both. And Paper Camera supports the same wacky filter set for videos you shoot.
We love the fact that the app saves both the original file and the filtered version to our library so we can do what we want with the original.
Sexting gets visual with Flirtmoji. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
With packages of dirty emoji filed under group headings like Teen Dream and Fetish 101, the artistically perverted designers at Flirtmoji are ready to help the masses up their sexting game.
Anatomically correct emoji, plus classic icons of the sexual revolution such as the rainbow flag and a banana wearing a condom, will make it easy for you to make yourself perfectly clear.
When it comes to Black Friday shopping online, no one does it bigger than Amazon. Starting today, Amazon’s Black Friday hub will be featuring new deals literally every 10 minutes, which is probably too much for the feeble human brain to handle.
There will be limited-time Lightning Deals, Deals of the Day, and a slew of discounts for everything from 4K TVs to Rubik’s cubes. And of course Amazon Prime customers will be treated like royalty with free shipping and the ability to get deals before everyone else.
Microsoft has assaulted Siri with a wave of ads pitting the popular digital assistant against Windows Phone’s Cortana, and while Siri repeatedly gets topped in areas like traffic alerts and reminders, she’s got some secret rhyming skills Cortana can’t top.
To showcase Siri’s mad ability to flow like lava, hip-hop producer Skeewiff featured her skills on his latest track “Know How.” Turns out Siri had the busiest rhymes ever made by man after all, and she’s got some harsh words for Cortana and Google Now.
Awwww, yiss! New MMO mode for Goat Simulator is free to current Steam owners. Photo: Goat Simulator
What’s better than goats? Goats you can control in a weird physics-simulator, of course.
What’s better than that? A full-on massively multiplayer online version of the goat sim. Duh.
The hilarious developers at Coffee Stain Studios (Sanctum, Sanctum 2) just offered up a free patch to all current owners (via Steam, not iOS) of the game, turning a wacky game jam cult hit into an MMO with various classes, like the Tank, or Magician.
Shit just goat serious, guys. Check out the sweet trailer below.
The first successful full-color video game came out in 1979. Photo: Stuart Brown
If you’ve been alive in the past fifty years or so, you’ve played a video game. It’s a primarily visual art form that uses current-day technologies to provide ever-evolving gaming experiences across generations.
This new series of short, ten-minute videos written and produced by Stuart Brown aim to take a closer look at the evolution of video game graphics, from the simple monochromatic lines of Pong to the incredibly rich and detailed photo realism of today’s games like Crysis, Destiny, and Far Cry 4.
“Graphics are absolutely important,” says Brown in the fifth and final video. “They are an essential part of video games. A window into another world and a prime indicator of the technology that powers it.”
Square is getting Apple Pay in 2015. Photo: Square
The launch of Apple Pay last month was seen by many as a possible deathblow to Square’s mobile payments service, but CEO Jack Dorsey told CNN today that he doesn’t view Apple Pay as a competitor at all. In fact, Dorsey says his company is open to all forms of payment methods, and they plan to start accepting Apple Pay next year.
Colder temperatures are coming. Be ready with some super cool cold weather accessories from TRNDlabs that will ensure you stay warm and keep you connected at the same time.
The Verdict: Most likely. Apple's been trying to reduce its dependency on Samsung components and manufacturing for years, but the problem is there's just not another company that can compete with Samsung's chipmaking biz. TSMC tried but they're still not able to handle as much of the load as Apple would like, so Apple's stuck with Samsung, for better or worse.
Amazon will roll out a new, standalone video streaming service next year that won’t be bundled with a $99 Prime subscription, according to sources familiar with its plans. The retail giant hopes to take on rivals like Netflix and Hulu and undercut their prices in an effort to attract customers.